Getty Museum

[Big Tree Felton (Redwood), Santa Cruz]

Creator

American Photographer · 1829–1916

AmbrotypistPublisherArtist

At twenty, Carleton Watkins headed out to California to make his fortune. After working as a daguerreotype operator in San Jose, he established his own practice and soon made his first visit to the Yosemite Valley. There he made thirty mammoth plate and one hundred stereograph views that were among the first photographs of Yosemite seen in the East. Partly on the strength of Watkins's photographs,

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Date: 1882–1886
Medium: Albumen silver print
Culture: American
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Relationships between small and large, dark and light, and man and nature are all evident in this monumental portrait of a giant coastal redwood in Santa Cruz, California. Carleton Watkins, the photographer, composed this image with two diminutive figures at the base of the behemoth to illustrate the tree's grand scale. While the sun beams down across the left side of the photograph, a dark shadow fills the foreground. Watkins made numerous pictures of California's trees, predominantly in Yosemite and Santa Cruz, throughout the late 1800s. His photographs were exhibited on the East Coast, testifying to people that the outlandish stories they had read and heard about the western wilderness were true. Watkins's pictures were instrumental in the successful effort to reserve Yosemite as a national park.

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